New England and Chesapeake

Question: Although New England and the Chesapeake region were both settled largely by people of English origin, by 1700 the regions had evolved into two distinct societies. Why did this difference in development occur?

In the mid-1600's, when both the New England and Chesapeake regions first began to colonize, each had the same goals and hopes for the New World'. Both sought freedom, money and power but, instead of finding their dreams they found hardships such as Indians, unfarmed land and weather much different from England. In order to stake it out, each colony began building and working.

Just as they settled, the differences formed. In Virginia there were few women and without women the men had little of a home to work for, therefore many men weren't motivated to work and so many died (Document B). However, in New England, mostly families had colonized, therefore giving the settlers reason to work and civilize their surroundings (Document C). The women factor made the schism between the two regions even larger, since the Virginians didn't feel stability they looked for companionship with Indian women after which Virginian women held more power, due to their scarcity and so many stayed single.

Due to the different lands in each region, the south learned to depend on their farm crops such as rice, tobacco and etc. While the north relied on livestock, furs (traded by the Indians), apples, corn, pumpkins and other various crops. Since the lands were so unlike, the North settled into communities of religious unity bound by the church. As it shows in Document D, Massachusetts made a covenant that bound them to believe in their God, to allot property convenient to all inhabitants and to share the farmland amongst them. In New England region, the community was much more communal than that of the Chesapeake region. As shown in Document F, many of the settlers came to the New...

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The majority of those who settled NewEngland and the Chesapeake Colonies were from England however, both groups came to the New World for different reasons, settled different areas, and therefore upheld two distinct societies.
NewEngland settled for religious reasons
Back home in England the Puritans, who wanted to purify the Anglican church, and Separatists, who wanted to separate from the Anglican church, were trying to live in a country that was going through a depression, tolerated excessive drinking, gambling, and swearing while the king promised to rid the country of all radical Protestant reformers. The Puritans, in an attempt to keep the non-Puritan people away, wanted to flee to an area that was unknown and uninviting which turned out to be the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Separatists founded the Plymouth Colony. Those that came to the NewEngland area were religious families that had no desire to get rich, they simply wanted a place to call home while they practiced their religion and according to John Winthrop become a “city on a hill”. Their strict religious beliefs that allowed them to believe in the devil led to the Salem witch hysteria in 1692 where many, perhaps too assertive for their time, women were hung.
Chesapeake settled...

...Mayflower landed, the colonists who emerged from the ships had huge plans and tremendous goals for what would come of their own colony. However, although both settled regions were the new homes to a majority of the English, two separate societies formed. In NewEngland, the colonists were religious extremists hoping to form a perfect society, while gold hunters with little or no desire to create a permanent home flocked to the Chesapeake region. The colonists in the north were more concerned with family values than those in the south, whose society suffered from a great lack of women and such a high death rate that family ties were hard to keep. As time went by, the development of slavery and indentured servitude started making an autocracy of rich cash crop farmers in the Chesapeake region, while in NewEngland continued to have a majority of small farmers, along with some fishermen and shipbuilders. The differences between the colonists' goals, populous, and economy caused NewEngland and the Chesapeake region to form completely separate societies.
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During the 1610, the NewEngland and Chesapeake region were both settled largely by people of English origin, but by 1700 the regions developed into two distinct societies. The distinctions of development arose due to differences in economy and political structure. The economy and political structure of NewEngland and Chesapeake differed based on the geography, needs and the different values or purposes that the regions served, causing two distinct societies to emerge by 1700.
In terms of economics, early distinctions occurred in that the economy of the Chesapeake colonies was based on large plantations whereas the economy of NewEngland was based on subsistence farming and mercantilism. In early 17th century Virginia, tobacco became Virginia’s biggest profits. By 1700, 40 million pounds of tobacco was produced and large plantations were dedicated to just growing tobacco, producing a single crop economy. The large plantations provided landowners or tobacco growers with cheap and plentiful labor through the use of slaves and indentured servants. In document C, the passengers aboard the ship bound for Virginia are all mostly made up of single men well below the age of 40, showing that many are probably indentured servants who are going to work in the large plantations. By the 1660s the overproduction of tobacco dramatically...

... Settlement in the new world occurred for different reasons, which led to the development of two different societies. New Englanders attempted to create a religious Utopia while the members of the Chesapeake created their society based off of economic goals. People of English origin were the main settlers in the two regions even though they were two very distinct societies. They had major differences in ideas, values and settlement strategies, which were led, by stark difference in the economical, political and social dynamics of each civilization. These three aspects were part of the major differential in development that occurred.
From prior knowledge as well as use of the documents, one could see the large differences in the two societies politically. Politics is a major importance in any type of community; it could easily make or break it entirely. New England’s politics came mostly from religion and the ways of God, as seen in Document D. Political voice in communities was determined by religion, as in the leaders were picked by people with high ability in religion. Leaders were also ruled by divine right, meaning that the rulers gained all their power from God himself. Also, as long as there were churchgoers, the poor man was equally powerful as the rich man politically, changing society, as they knew it. As you can see, New Englanders believed very strongly in religion causing major differences...

...Although NewEngland and the Chesapeake were settled by the English, by 1700 they had evolved into two distinct societies. The Chesapeake was originally settled by people looking for gold. Many of those people were single men that had a very short life expectancy. The Chesapeake had fertile soil and enabled the people to grow tobacco. However, the NewEngland region was settled by families for religious reasons. Their major occupations were fishing, shipbuilding, and lumbering. They had a cold climate and rocky soil.
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...NewEngland vs. the Chesapeake
The discovery of the Americas gave a ray of hope to promising settlers who would migrate from England to begin a new and improved life. Most of these settlers ended up in either the NewEngland colonies or the Chesapeake colonies. These two colonies could not have been more opposite of one another. The fact that they were so different makes it no surprise that by the 1700’s the NewEngland colonies and the Chesapeake colonies had evolved into two distinct societies. There are numerous reasons why these differences in development occurred.
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...began moving to the New World in search of a new, prosperous life. There were two main areas in America that the English settled in, NewEngland and the Chesapeake region. These settlers voyaged to America for either religious freedom or to start a new life. Religion seekers came to the New World to escape the oppression of the Catholic Church. Others came in search of a job, or because of their low social class. The NewEngland and the Chesapeake regions became two distinct regions because of these social, economic, and religious tragedies.
Many of the settlers who traveled to the New World were in search of a new life and suffered much social discrimination. There were thousands of people all looking for valuables to take back to England to escape the downcast life they led in society there. In Bacon’s “Manifesto” sent to Virginia Governor Berkley in 1676, Nathaniel Bacon is quoted as saying, “All people in all places where we have yet been can attest our civil, quiet, peaceable behavior…”(Document H). Most of these pioneers in the New World, that were attempting to escape the calamities of society, lived in the Chesapeake region. As shown in Document A, the list of emigrants traveling to Virginia who were mostly young and single men went to the...